OOokay, so this was a long time coming. but here it is, Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi! chapter 1. The first series done by Shimabukuro Mitsutoshi, author of Toriko. I wanted to work on this series a looong time. I think I bought the series back in 2011. We’re gonna do this series by chapters because we’re using wide-bans as raws, which is a sort of deluxe reprint version of the series which is a little less than 2 regular volumes worth in length. So it’s kinda too much to try to release at once. The series has 13 wide-bans, totaling 247 chapters (And given that it’s a gag manga mostly, it’s quite wordy and takes a lot of effort to translate each chapter. Like waaay more than 81diver). I’m also not saying I’m gonna do the whole series, I’m just gonna start at the beginning and see where it goes. I’ve got a lot of projects I’m doing right now and a lot are ones I started like many years ago. I dunno if I’ll be able to finish them because as talked about in my post about Toriko’s ending, I do this as a hobby and I have a full time job. Trying to get a long series done on a weekly basis or something close to that can be impossible sometimes without losing tons of sleep or stressing yourself out. So I’m gonna see how this goes. We have a new staff member Joeabandonedmine who’s doing a lot of work on this, so major props to him.

I’ll talk a little about Takeshi the series. Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi (OrLegend of End of the Century Leader Takeshi) started in Shounen Jump issue 1997-33. That’s exactly one week before One Piece started, and Shimabukuro-sensei and Oda-sensei were friends at the time and still are, I think. Takeshi is a comedic adventure manga. Much more of a parody of typical shounen manga than a straight-up shounen manga. Though it has its own world and battles and stuff, it gets really goofy, they break the 4th wall, and they purposefully go out of their way to not take things too seriously most of the time. Like the main character looks like an ugly middle-aged man but is in the 1st grade of elementary school. Stuff gets weird and over-the-top, but it’s still got an emotional core to everything. Its ability to snap back to that emotional core from the crazy weirdness is its best point, I think.

It was one of the most popular manga in Jump for a few years. It also won the 2001 Shogakukan Manga Award for children’s manga. Though also, as I’m sure a lot of you know, it got cancelled because the author was convicted of paying for an underage prostitute in 2002 mid-arc. And Shimabukuro-sensei didn’t work on any manga for a while. Later in 2005, the series was finished off in Super Jump, a seinen manga magazine that ended publication in 2011. They printed the Wide-Bans and finished compiling the uncollected Shounen Jump chapters and also the Super Jump chapters in those (Which was the last 10 chapters of the series, and were released alongside the author’s other series Ring, which we scanlated a while back). It ended up as 24 volumes, plus a “gaiden” volume which had the original Takeshi one-shots (There were 2 of them) along with some other one-shots the author did. Shimabukuro did another book of One-Shots that was released around volume 4 of Toriko, too, if you hadn’t heard about that. Toriko also had 2 one-shots, one of which was published in 2002, so it’s possible he was planning to end Takeshi soon anyhow.

Here’s an article for Takeshi as a series if you want to hear a bit more background.

Seikimatsu Leader den Takeshi!

But in spite of the series’ rough publication, it’s still an excellent series I encourage you all to check out. I’m hoping to get chapters released at a somewhat regular pace. But I’m also doing Gintama, Jojolion, 81diver, and the Jojo novel The Book. So I can’t make any promises about that or how much I’m gonna do. I do at least want to get the beginning done and I hope everyone enjoys it.

Edit (12/12/2016): Made a couple really minor edits and reuploaded this chapter. All links are updated.

Seikimatsu Leader Den Takeshi! 1
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